Against a Perfect Sniper by Shiden Kanzaki Page B

kilometers away, it’s a stunt. More than that, and it’s a coincidence.”
    Rentaro was shocked. “It’s that hard?”
    “Try taking a hula hoop from the P.E. equipment room and using it in a ring toss to try to get a color cone twenty meters away. Sniping is different from a ring toss, but it’ll help you understand just how hard that is.”
    “That…is hard…” Rentaro didn’t have to do it to imagine how impossible that would be. He finally understood what Miori was trying to say. She was suggesting that to pull off the feat of hitting a target a kilometer away three times was pretty much impossible.
    Then, Miori explained the effects of temperature, humidity, angle, pressure, Coriolis force (how the bullet has a hill-like trajectory and is the highest at 55 percent of the way to its target), and the wind around the buildings that are the natural enemies of snipers.
    Rentaro closed his eyes and thought back to the flames of the limousine, the people’s screams, and the glint from the roof of the building. There was no mistaking it. There really was a sniper there who shot from that building. It didn’t matter what Miori said.
    Suddenly, Rentaro asked Miori about a suspicion that came to mind. “Hey, Miori, your company sells weapons wholesale to police and the self-defense force, too, right? Do you know someone called Takuto Yasuwaki?”
    “No.”
    “He’s the captain of the Seitenshi’s personal guard. Do the Shiba Heavy Weapons files have anything on him? Tell me what you know about him.”
    Miori tilted her head and put her hands together, saying, “Search, Takuto Yasuwaki.” When she did, the search started at dizzying speeds, and in no time, the display called up a headshot of Yasuwaki. Next to it was a brief personal history.
    “Takuto Yasuwaki. Age thirty-two, male. His rank is second lieutenant. Satomi dear, you’re a master sergeant, so he’s one rank above you.”
    “Huh?” There was one phrase he couldn’t let pass without comment. “Hey, Miori, I’m not a soldier, so I don’t have a rank.”
    More precisely, since the New Humanity Creation Project was started by the self-defense force, when Rentaro underwent the enhancementoperation, he was forced to register as a solider, but his rank was supposed to be that of the lowest soldier. It definitely wasn’t anything as self-important sounding as
master sergeant
.
    “Yes, you do. Even if it’s just a pseudo-rank, as your IP rank goes up, your top-secret information access key goes along with it. Your IP rank is 1,000, so you’re a master sergeant, Satomi dear.”
    Now that she mentioned it, during the conferment ceremony, he thought did receive a top-secret access key and pseudo-rank to go along with his promotion to rank 1,000. The top-secret access key he got was so low level that he couldn’t get any valuable information. If Rentaro wanted to find out more about his parents and details of the Gastrea War, he needed a higher-level access key, after all. “Well, what can I do with that pseudo-rank, then?”
    “Nothing much, really. Since you do roughly the same work as someone of regular rank, you have the right to give orders, but since at most yours is a
pseudo
-rank, you don’t have the authority to lead soldiers or have them follow your orders.”
    The right to give orders without the right to lead, huh? “Then, what’s the point of those ranks?”
    “Giving civsec officers those ranks makes them feel better, and that way they can make people think ‘The civsec officers still belong to the country.’”
    Rentaro sighed. “Even though they’re
civilian
security agencies, they’re tied to the government, huh?”
    “Well, it can’t be helped. The strongest civsec officer pairs are strong enough to change the world’s military balance, so countries want to manage them as much as possible. The civsec officer system was originally declared a privatization of military power with great fanfare at the beginning, but these